Completed Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy last night (100%
) so moved straight on to playing some
Jak II I'm probably enjoying it a bit more than I did back in the day it still frustrates me that they didn't stick more closely to the foundation of the first game and instead tried to turn it into some kind of GTA/Shooter/Platformer hybrid.
Jak's movement, skillset and silky animations are one of the absolute highlights of the first game, it is just a joy to traverse the world using this character. Whether you are exploring one of the levels or moving between them in the relatively small but dense hub areas it is simply just a fun experience to control Jak. Whilst the second game keeps this excellent movement for Jak it continually punches holes in that joy by having you need to explore a needlessly large semi-open world city area where moving on foot, something which as noted the game really excels at from a gameplay perspective, is basically ditched in favour of moving in one of these hover vehicles, something which just simply is not fun.
One of the primary problems is that these vehicles control horribly with a really weird acceleration/deceleration curve and terrible turning physics. They can only fly at one of two heights - on the ground where you basically just hit people/guards all the time, or in the air where you just crash into other vehicles all the time. Something like GTA has cars that can accelerate relatively quickly, brake fast and have solid controls that allow for quick adjustments - you can ping yourself around at speed even in fairly dense traffic because the controls allow you to avoid traffic and pick a path to where you need to be. In this by the time you know you are going to hit something the controls basically make it impossible to do anything about it because they are so slow and the vehicle turning is so awkward - you just end up drifting in to everything.
This is compounded by the drab design of the environments and utterly awful map. The design of the world admittedly makes sense from a world building perspective - this is supposed to be a fairly dystopian looking place, but it really doesn't help from a gameplay sense. Everywhere looks too similar, there are not enough landmarks or differentiating elements to let you navigate effectively without constantly refering to the map. And the map is just bad. The icons on the minimap seem to shift position as you move around in a really awkward way - I can't tell if they are trying to tell you something about the immediate corner you need to take or a hint of that kind but they are definitely not just simple compass markers. Accessing the full map is also awkward, requiring you to go into the main menu, switch to the map option and then activate it - why not just put it on a spare button like select?
So between the awkward controls, terrible map, and navigation unfriendly world design you seem to spend an inordinate amount of your time in this game bouncing around this city, crashing, failing to know where you are going and, put simply, not having fun. It's such a massive jarring change from the first game where the simple act of getting around was just a joy.
When you do get to a "mission" (
) area then the game switches back into something
far more enjoyable - the platforming and combat aspects are still mostly excellent, and the game gets to shine again!
It's such a shame that this seemed to be an early casualty of the "everything needs to be like GTA, lets go open world!" craze that sadly is still going on today.